i think my powerbook hard drive is dieing

macrumors member

tonight system started to just hang so i rebooted it and then the machine sat for 10 minutes at the while apple screen and the hard drive sounded like it kept trying to read the same data over and over.

macrumors regular

tonight system started to just hang so i rebooted it and then the machine sat for 10 minutes at the while apple screen and the hard drive sounded like it kept trying to read the same data over and over.

I ran the hardware testa nd it gave error code:

2STF /4/3: ata-100-6-Master

is my drive gone?

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Did you try repairing it using the disk utility using the instal disc 1? While booting from the installer disk, press c and hold and you can find disk utility in the utilities tab. There you can run a disk repair and see....
Hope it helps man!!!!

macrumors G5

It may be a flaw on the motherboard, but.. more likely the drive itself.

Start pricing out a Seagate Momentus 2.5" hard drive -- 5400 with an 8 Mb cache is the bset price-performance, and it has a 5 year warranty. Also price a Firewire 2.5" drive enclosure, they're not too expensive. Then you can clone the internal drive to the new one in the FW case, then swap drives. Don't be surprised if you have to reinstall OS X in any case because your existing OS files may be borked.

Then, when you are up and running on the new drive, yu can put the old one in the enclosure and reformat it then test it. If you're lucky it may be usable, and you'll have a travel drive, if not, pitch the old drive and you have a spare enclosure -- which you can load with another drive you pick up cheap, or you can use to be a hero to friends with laptops in similar straights.

macrumors 6502

after trying disk repair again and it said nothing i booted and it is now going on 10 minutes and i am at the blue screen but nothing has come up yet in terms of the loading os x.

the drive sounds like it keeps trying to read but can't. Problem is the nearest applestore is about 70 miles away.

hmm while typing this i am now at a blue screen with the spinning loading wheel, never seen that before. Any idea what the heck that means?

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I had the continuous spinning beachball a few weeks ago...at first I chacked and it said my drive was fine, then I got a SMART alert saying my drive was going to fail.... backup as much as you can!!! I had no external drive so I had to get 35 Gigs onto DVD!
What Im saying is START YOUR BACKUP NOW...your drive is going to fail!
Hate to be the harbinger of bad news but their is no other way I had a hard time accepting it too...sorry I know the feeling all too well!
And My G5 was only a month old!
R

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